Israel: squares demand Arab parties be given a seat at the table of power

According to RFI, several squares in Israel hosted demonstrations on Saturday 31 October calling for Arab parties to sit as of right at the table of the future government. The movement is backed by the Standing Together collective. It wants to weigh on the ongoing negotiations after the general election and shake up the reflexes of the opposition, so as to block Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud. What the dispatch does not say: the scale of the gatherings, the position of the parties concerned, or the terms of any possible agreement. We will not invent them.

What follows is our reading. The demand may look technical, a simple exercise in parliamentary arithmetic. Yet it touches on the question Israeli coalitions have been sidestepping for decades: that of Palestinian citizens of Israel, whom governments are happy to court as a makeweight force but prefer to keep at arm's length from power. To demand their presence "as of right" is to refuse their role as a mere reservoir of votes, useful on polling day, invisible the next morning.

One can read in it a test of what Cabral called the union of the exploited: a lasting alliance requires organising around shared material needs, not only against a single man. A "anyone but Netanyahu" front is an alliance of convenience. A common programme on housing, wages, public services and equal rights would be another matter altogether. Nothing in the dispatch says where this movement stands. That is precisely the question to put to it.

We should also ask who benefits from the division. The old reflex that sets one group of workers against another, Jews against Arabs, citizens against subjects, has always served those who govern. The divisions a society organises are rarely spontaneous: they function as a mode of management. The Standing Together protesters seem to bet that this mode of management can be undone from below.

There is also a limit, which must be faced squarely and with restraint. In a state where law and land are unequally distributed, a parliamentary alliance, even a successful one, says nothing by itself about the fate of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, who do not vote in this election. Arab parties in Israel, for their part, must weigh the influence gained from within against the risk of lending legitimacy to a system they contest. That dilemma is theirs to resolve, and it is not for us to settle.

A coalition can change the face of a government without touching its structure. Fanon and Cabral insisted on this about independence: replacing the leaders is not enough if the apparatus remains the same. The Israeli street therefore poses a good question. It does not yet say whether the answer will go as far as equality, or stop at an arithmetical majority.